Airline Tariff Publishing Company
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The Airline Tariff Publishing Company, or ATPCO, is a corporation which publishes mulitiple times per day the latest airfares for more than 500 airlines. Based at Washington Dulles International Airport outside of Washington, D.C., ATPCO is owned by a number of US and international airlines.
ATPCO provides the fares data in an electronic format with encoded rules associated with the fares, which make the information suitable for computer processing.
The users of the data are Global Distribution Systems (GDS), such as Sabre, Amadeus, Galileo, Worldspan as well as the Computer Reservation Systems (CRS) of airlines, travel agents and other service providers in the travel industry. Because the data is formatted for computer processing, the latest fares can be loaded automatically, allowing these new fares to be sold in the market place in the shortest possible time.
Airlines carefully monitor new fares filed by their competition for publication through ATPCO, to detect the intent of other airlines to increase or decrease their fares for specific connections, and use this as input for setting their own pricing strategy. For instance, if they see a competitor introducing special promotional pricing between two cities, they may want to quickly react by filing their own special fares through ATPCO for that market [1].
[edit] History
The Air Traffic Conference of America, a body within the Air Transport Association of America (ATA), was founded in 1945 to publish passenger tariffs (fares). In 1958 it assumed publication of freight tariffs, formerly produced by Air Cargo Inc., and in 1965 the group divested from ATA as an independent company, Airline Tariff Publishers, Inc. It was reorganized and took its current name in 1975.
